I finished reading Days of Distraction and it's a 5/5 for me! Still brewing the review but herr are some lines that really struck gold:
"I could see pieces of our lives floating among the snowflakes, melting on the windshield, and for those brief moments I was living with the certainty that I was exactly where I should be, where everything was deeply quiet yet deeply alive. I thought about the many aspects in this life that I could not control or understand, despite how much I wanted to or tried, how my fatherâs life, my motherâs life, the lives around me and the figures from the past, they were not mine to determine, not mine to map out, no matter how much they shaped what I had become, however much we were connected, I could only help in small ways, I could listen and piece together and recount, but what was truly mine was only a little, no, a minuscule speck of it all, and while this was a sort of devastation to me, one I knew it would take some time to fully accept, it felt nice, at least, to be on the way, in spite of not knowing exactly how far I had come nor how far I had left to go."
"For the last several years I have said to him that I do not ever want to be pregnant. Itâs not that I donât like children. I love them. I want to adopt. There are so many babies who need homes that it doesnât make sense to me to make another baby of our own. Truthfully, the impulse was selfish at first. I donât want to carry anything in my uterus, and I donât want my body to blow up and my bones to lose density, and I absolutely donât want to deal with the pain of giving birth and the possibility of my vagina tearing into my asshole.
After speaking to scientists working at a showerhead company, of all places, who said my generationâs children would likely be the generation to deal with the apocalypse, I felt more justified in my not wanting to bring any more babies into the world. I canât tell others to do the same, and I am happy to raise some of their children to have the wherewithal to make it through a world on the brink of annihilation. Who knows how exactly yet, since Iâm fairly certain I would be among the first to go in an apocalyptic situation. I donât know how to do anything except think and talk. I am legally blind without my contacts or glasses. I can walk relatively fast for extended periods of time, but I can barely run. My only postapocalyptic survival skill is being with J. So when he looks a little teary, and very upset, at my no-baby ranting, I stop and say, Who knows. I could change my mind. It is changing all the time."
"This isnât the first time. The racial matchup was so common in San Francisco, it was easier to ignore, unless, that is, we had to walk directly by a pair where the man had the exact same coloring as J, the pale skin and the brownish hair, both with a tint of red. And this did happen more than once or twice. At least five times. I would grip his arm and glance at the man, then the womanâwho sometimes, but not as often, in my opinion at least, would look very similar to meâthen back at the man. I would push J along in order to pass faster, to distance ourselves faster. I didnât like to think about how our relationship, which I felt was singular, could be lumped into a âtype.â Then there was the eerie feeling that came with seeing a mirror couple, the questioning of how they came to be, if their lives were parallel to ours, if their experiences were similar, and whether one of us could be swapped with the other without anyone noticing a difference."
"When we talked about race, we did so mostly from a distance or as a joke, like something that could not touch the depths of this combined entity that was âus.â But I know we do not and cannot exist outside of it. I know I am guilty of avoiding, or not completing, the conversations. That might still be our problem."
"And as a result, [my mother] felt very envious of me for the opportunities that I had and this created a lot of tension between us. I donât know whether that exists for Chinese or the Asian families that are coming here to the United States today. So that being born Chinese was not so much a question of being discriminated against because I was Chinese, though thereâs some of that, but a sense that I had a different outlook on life. I had the idea, for example, from my father that a crisis is not only a danger but also an opportunity and that there is a positive and negative in everything. Not only a danger but also an opportunity.
I had a similar idea from my father, though I had not thought of it before as particularly Chinese."
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